Curated by the self-described “post-communication anthropologist” Dr. Sybil Turner-Greene, this group show gathers eleven artists from five countries to examine the evolutionary leap from Alexander Graham Bell’s Mr. Watson, come here to our current seen at 12:43 PM.
Occupying the converted call centre that now houses The Dead Media Project’s London space, the exhibition leans into its own site specificity. The faint smell of burnt coffee and fluorescent-light fatigue still clings to the walls, adding an authentic whiff of obsolescence. Visitors are greeted by a receptionist (performance artist Olly Krell in business-casual cosplay) who answered every question I asked him with, “Thank you. Can I put you on hold?”
The first room is a shrine to missed calls and unreturned voicemails. Here, Lina Moreau’s Direct Line,a cluster of Bakelite receivers dangling like forlorn bats from the ceiling,whispers fragments of archived conversations, from flirtations to insurance disputes. It’s half ghost story, half telecom archaeology. Across from it, Berlin-based Yonah Kim offers Soil Service, a miniature graveyard of early-2000s Nokias, each “planted” in a terracotta pot. They are sprouting something amongst the moss and SIM cards, as though Mother Nature is trying to reboot Snake.
The heart of the show belongs to Amina Torres’s Ring/Tone, a four-hour cacophony of historical ringtones played through 64-speakers. At times it sounds like an anxious conference call, at others like a Nokia having an existential crisis. The jaunty polyphonic jingles of the pre-iPhone age to the weaponised chirps of WhatsApp notifications – Torres doesn’t so much critique as wallow in the absurdity of sounds seemingly designed to make you jump.
Then there’s Riccardo Esposito’s The Last Minute, a single-channel video work showing people about to answer a ringing landline but never doing so. Shot in ultra-slow motion, the piece turns indecision into cinema. The gallery label notes its “exploration of deferred intimacy,” which is a generous way of saying “the art of ghosting, circa 1998.”
By the time you’ve staggered past the first wave of handset nostalgia and ringtone anthropology, the exhibition swerves sharply into stranger, more speculative territory. Four additional artists round out Turner-Greene’s thesis that the phone is no longer a device but a veritable new species , one that has evolved beyond its original communicative function and now lives parasitically inside our frontal lobes.
Naruto Mizushima’s installation Infinite Hold is a labyrinth of upholstered booths, each playing the endless hold music he composed himself: a nauseatingly soothing mix of faux-jazz and corporate chimes. The seating is comfortable enough that you might sit down “just for a second,” only to realise twenty minutes later that your sense of time has been smothered.
Projected across an entire wall, Camille Draper’s Last Seen Online at… scrapes anonymised “last seen” timestamps from messaging apps and arranges them in real time into a slow, digital aurora. The effect is strangely beautiful, but as one man whispered to his partner, “I feel like I’m spying on strangers”. Draper’s work captures the low-grade paranoia of our new social clock , we no longer measure absence in days, but in the seconds since someone was “active.”
The performance-installation hybrid Phantom Buzz involves Rufus Hargreaves walking slowly through the gallery wearing trousers that vibrate at random intervals, a low-tech contraption wired to a hidden metronome. Visitors are invited to wear a similar belt for a few minutes. The result: an uncanny awareness of the body’s muscle memory for notifications.
Sofía Caldera’s Voicemail #404 is a set of reimagined “error messages” voiced by actors in the style of 1970s telephone operators. They apologise profusely for lost connections that never existed and congratulate you for calls you never made. Played through vintage answering machines, these disjointed apologies sound almost tender.
Historically, the exhibition is peppered with winks to telecommunication art from the Fluxus era, but it’s no academic mausoleum. Instead, it borrows just enough gravitas to let the jokes land. In the catalogue, Turner-Greene describes the show as “a meditation on voice, absence, and the collapse of asynchronous time into a single infinite scroll.” That’s curator-speak for: we don’t talk to each other anymore, but we do send each other links to videos of cute raccoons.
The show leaves London for Amsterdam’s Kunstverein this autumn, then heads to the U.S., opening at the Wadsworth Atheneum, where it will be installed in a room historically used for silent reading.
By the time I left the exhibition, the title question had done its work. I reached for my phone, wondered whether to check messages, then,almost reflexively,opened the camera app.
You might not have recently used your phone as a phone, but I’ll bet you’ve used it as a mirror.
